To be or not to be … jacked in?
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
One of the books I recently read was William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This is the first part of “the Sprawl trilogy“. Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (I’ve read all of them) are the most impressive presentation of the Cyberspace I’ve ever read - a vivid, colorful world of computer networks in contrast with the real world, which is “like an experiment in social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher who kept his thumb permanently on the fast forward button”.
Case, the “artiste”, is a crippled ex-console cowboy. He tried to doublecross those who hired him, and they punish him in the worst possible way: they burn his nervous system using a mushroom poison and make him incapable of jacking into the Matrix (gee, I wonder where the Wachowsky brothers took their movie title from…).
He would die alone in the Sprawl if Armitage and his unlikely team (Molly, the Walkin’Razor, Peter Riviera the cyber-jester) wouldn’t offer him a way out of this situation, in return for his services as a hacker. So, Case starts his journey up the gravity well and into Cyberspace to do the bidding of Wintermute, an AI who desires to be more…
A real cyberpunk trilogy, written by a man who hasn’t seen a computer in his life before writing the second part of it. I would recommend it to every Internet user and every Science Fiction fan in the world.
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